How to Use the Advanced Digitizing Toolbar

Introduction

The Advanced Digitizing Toolbar lets you edit the shape of lines and polygons efficiently. Rotating, moving, scaling, and splitting take just a few clicks, which makes editing GIS data much easier.

This article shows the feature editing operations available in the Advanced Digitizing Toolbar.

Enable the Advanced Digitizing Toolbar

To use the Advanced Digitizing Toolbar, right-click the toolbar area and check Advanced Digitizing Toolbar.

The Advanced Digitizing Toolbar icons appear in the toolbar. The tools are active only while a layer is in edit mode, so switch the layer you want to edit to edit mode first.

Reshape features

You can change the shape of a line or polygon by moving vertices with the Vertex Tool. This section shows how to reshape a feature substantially instead of moving vertices one at a time.

The following article covers the Vertex Tool in detail.

Use Reshape Features in the Advanced Digitizing Toolbar.

To reshape a line, click so that your path crosses the line, then right-click to finish. The line takes the shape you clicked.

To expand a polygon, start inside the polygon, click outside it, then come back inside the polygon and finish.

To remove part of a polygon, do the opposite: start outside the polygon, click inside it, come back outside the polygon, and right-click to finish.

Move or copy features

Use Move Feature(s) to move a feature.

Click the feature you want to move, then click the destination. The feature moves there.

To copy a feature, click the ▼ arrow to the right of the icon, select Copy and Move Feature(s), and repeat the same steps.

Rotate features

Use Rotate Feature(s) to rotate a feature.

1. Click the feature you want to rotate.

2. Move the mouse. The feature rotates with it.

   You can also enter the rotation angle directly in Rotation, shown at the top right.

   If you set an angle for snapping, the rotation snaps to increments of that angle.

3. Click again to confirm the rotation.

Scale features

Use Scale Feature(s) to enlarge or shrink a feature.

1. Click the feature you want to enlarge or shrink.

2. Move the mouse. The feature scales with it.

   Moving the pointer toward the center of the feature shrinks it, and moving it away enlarges it.

3. Click again to confirm the size.

Cut a hole in a polygon (create a donut polygon)

Suppose you have a polygon for a park and want to remove only the pond area. To create an empty area inside a polygon, use Add Ring.

Click the Add Ring button in the toolbar.

Click inside the polygon where you want the ring and draw its shape. Right-click to finish, and the area you drew becomes a hole.

Remove a hole from a polygon

To delete the hole in a donut polygon, use Delete Ring.

With the Delete Ring tool, click the hole you want to remove.

Embed another feature inside a polygon

Suppose the polygon for one municipality (City A) contains an enclave that belongs to another city (City B). How should you create this data?

Drawing City B's polygon over City A's polygon may seem like enough. However, the two areas then overlap (left in the figure below), which is impossible in reality. Instead, create City B's polygon so that it fits into a hole in City A's polygon (right).

To embed the polygon of another feature inside a polygon like this, use Fill Ring.

Split lines and polygons

Split Features and Split Parts cut a single line or polygon into two features.

Both Split Features and Split Parts split a feature, but they differ as follows.

• Split Features
  • The resulting features are treated as individual (single-part) features.
  • The attribute table is split too, so each feature has its own record.
• Split Parts
  • The feature is split into multiple parts (shapes), but it is treated as multipart data whose attributes are combined in a single record.

You can see the difference in the attribute table after splitting. With Split Features, the attribute table records are split and the number of records increases (left in the figure below). With Split Parts, the attribute table is not split and the number of records stays the same (right).

Merge multiple features into one

Suppose several features are separated by boundaries. To remove the boundaries and dissolve them into a single feature, use Merge Selected Features.

Select all the features you want to merge, then click Merge Selected Features.

A window opens where you specify the attribute values of the merged feature.

You can choose the attribute values from options such as Take attributes from selected feature, Take attributes from feature with the largest area, and Skip all fields (which leaves the attribute values empty).

Conclusion

The Advanced Digitizing Toolbar gives you a wide range of data creation tools: rotating, moving, scaling, and splitting features, as well as cutting holes in polygons and embedding features inside them.

Try these tools to create more advanced data.